Oracle's licensing is nothing of the sort. The fact that all features are enabled to catch out customers when it comes to audit time is unnecessary and deliberately deceptive. I cannot think of another vendor that gives away their software unrestricted with the sole aim of screwing customers on followup audits. We're seeing increasing numbers of companies moving to Postgres away from Oracle because of the totally onerous surprise costs that Oracle love to spring on loyal customers after audits.
This is not true unfortunately. According to Oracle if any component of your virtualised infrastructure touches nodes with Oracle software loaded on to them they have to be licensed as well. As an example; If you have a 4 node cluster fully licensed for Oracle RAC or whatever that's fine. However if the underlying shared storage serves any other nodes, eg, the rest of your virtualisation estate, regardless of whether or not Oracle would ever end up on there due to the host affinity as you say, those have to be fully licensed as well. I've seen Oracle pull this first hand and it is not pretty. We argued until we were blue in the face that the instances could never end up anywhere but those 4 nodes but Oracle were insistent that is how their licensing agreement is to be interpreted because they could potentially up there if we decided we really wanted to do that. I don't think the customer has paid up yet regardless. I think it's **** and honestly comes across as extremely predatory.
Under all circumstances I advise customers to steer clear of Oracle unless driven by a clearly defined and absolute business need. There is a lot of head and wallet ache with using their products regardless of quality.
As for MSSQL I suggest you fully digest the Licensing Guides linked above and then speak to at least one (preferably three) Microsoft licensing specialists with what you plan to purchase to get a consensus on what is acceptable. Their licensing phone line is very good if you can track down the website and phone number - I think they've merged it with the VLSC support centre. They will usually advise you on the cheapest way to fully license to meet your needs, which is also good.
